Gary McKinnon on hacking off America

Share via

The Glasgow geek tells how hunting UFOs got him in trouble with the Pentagon

When Gary McKinnon was 14 years old he was given an Atari 400, one of the earliest home computers. McKinnon used it to play rudimentary computer games, create graphics and write programs, displaying a precocious talent that developed almost as fast as the new technology.

A few years later the young techie went to see the film WarGames, in which a nerd, not unlike himself, brings the world to the brink of war by hacking into the Pentagon computer network. McKinnon began to wonder how easy that would be. He didn’t want to start a war. But he could use